What is the difference between sea salt and table salt? was reported by Jessica Caporuscio for MedicalNewsToday.com, 1 October 2019. Table salt and sea salt are both useful when preparing food. Manufacturers mine table salt from salt deposits and process it into a fine crystal, whereas sea salt comes from evaporating seawater.
Chefs use sea salt in some recipes because of its coarse and crunchy texture. Some people also prefer the stronger taste of sea salt. Although people may perceive sea salt to be better for health, it has the same sodium content as table salt. Some people believe that sea salt has less sodium than table salt, but this is a misconception.
Table salt and most sea salts both contain 40% sodium by weight. A teaspoon of table salt has 2,300 milligrams (mg) of sodium. The crystals of sea salt are larger, so fewer crystals can fit in 1 teaspoon.
Read more: What is the difference between sea salt and table salt?
Microbiome Composition Changes in Response to Cooked vs Raw Diet was published on Genengnews.com, 1 October 2019.
Humans are the only species that cook their food, and studies in mice and in humans by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Harvard University have now shown for the first time that eating raw vs cooked food can have a fundamental impact on the microbial communities that naturally live in the gut.
“It was exciting to see that the impact of cooking we see in rodents is also relevant to humans, although interestingly, the specifics of how the microbiome was affected differed between the two species,” commented Peter Turnbaugh, PhD, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology and a member of the executive leadership of the UCSF Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine. Turnbaugh and colleagues reported their findings in Nature Microbiology, in a paper titled, “Cooking shapes the structure and function of the gut microbiome.”
For their study reported in Nature Microbiology—which results from a seven-year collaboration between Turnbaugh and Harvard evolutionary biologist Rachel Carmody, PhD—the researchers examined the impact of cooked vs raw diet on the microbiomes of mice. Animals were fed diets of raw meat, cooked meat, raw sweet potatoes, or cooked sweet potatoes.
To the researchers’ surprise, whether the mice were fed raw or cooked meat had no discernible effect on their gut microbes. In contrast, diets containing raw vs cooked sweet potatoes significantly altered the composition of the animals’ microbiomes, as well as patterns of microbial gene activity and critical metabolites produced by the microbes. “Cooking impacted the gut microbiome differently on meat versus tuber diets,” the investigators noted. “The gut microbiomes of mice fed raw and cooked meat were similar in composition and transcriptional profile … By contrast, gut microbial community structure on the cooked tuber diet were fundamentally distinct.”
Read more: Microbiome Composition Changes in Response to Cooked vs Raw Diet
Dietary Fiber: Why it Does & Doesn’t Affect Your Blood Sugar was written by Ginger Vieira for InsulinNation.com, 1 October 2019. ‘Net carbs’ is good marketing but be aware of the actual impact on your blood sugar, which can be surprising in ‘low-carb’ products.
“Net carbs is a term that food manufacturers coined,” explains Jennifer Okemah, MS, RD, BCADM, CDE CSSD in Type 2 Nation’s article, Low-Carb Pasta Options.
“The human body does not calculate ‘net carbs.’ The intestinal lining does, in fact, absorb some fibers. That being said, higher intact fiber has many benefits on satiety, blunting the blood sugar spikes and lowering cholesterol. Just remember, when dosing your insulin or measuring your blood sugar, that the gut does not do the math and come up with ‘net carbs’.”
That being said, it’s still important to be aware of the total fiber count in the meal you’re eating as a person with diabetes because the larger the fiber quantity, the more it can impact your insulin needs.
Some of that fiber is still broken down into glucose. And these high-fiber products that contain large quantities of highly processed fiber are the biggest culprits.
How should you count fiber when calculating insulin?
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- Take good notes! Write down the food item, the “net” carbs, how much insulin you took…and then what happened! .
- Treat each high-fiber food as different than the last. In addition to the fiber in an apple being different than the fiber in a bowl of black beans, the type of fiber in your Quest Bar could be a different type of fiber than what’s in your favorite low-carb bread. Look at the ingredients to determine what types of fiber you’re consuming, and again…take good notes on how the “net” carbohydrate count impacted your blood sugar.
- The more fiber, the more likely some of it will affect your blood sugar. If there are 10+ grams of fiber in a food or product, the potential for some of that fiber affecting your blood sugar is higher simply because there’s more of it.
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What’s Really Inside a Meatless Burger? was detailed by Maya Kroth for Medium/Elemental, 2 October 2019.
The plant-based burgers are cholesterol-free and contain nutrients like vitamin B12 and zinc notes Emily Gelsomin, a registered dietitian and senior clinical nutrition specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. But when it comes to saturated fat, the Impossible patty actually contains more than beef, at eight grams of fat per serving to beef’s six. Some plant-based burger companies “are adding in things like coconut oil, which isn’t necessarily as healthy,” says Gelsomin, who notes that saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
Impossible and Beyond patties also come up shorter than one might expect on fiber, which is one reason doctors tell us to eat more vegetables in the first place. As a benchmark, a food should have at least three grams per serving to be considered a good source of fiber, Gelsomin says. Impossible and Beyond hit that mark, but barely. Compare that to the black bean–based Sunshine burger, which packs eight grams of fiber into a smaller, 2.7-ounce serving.
“Plant-based is not plants. It’s an ingredient from a plant,” says Ricardo San Martin, research director of the Alternative Meat Program at the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley. “In some cases, they preserve the benefits [of the plant], and in others, they don’t. We can’t get so far away from the plant that we lose the benefits of a plant-based diet.”“It takes a lot of chemicals and processing to get from a plant-based ingredient to something that feels like a meaty ingredient,” San Martin says. “It’s not like the plant makes protein isolate.”
Read more: What’s Really Inside a Meatless Burger?
Why Coffee Raises Your Blood Sugars was written by Ginger Vieira for InsulinNation.com, 3 October 2019.
Caffeine signals your brain to release or produce adrenaline — often referred to as the “fight or flight” hormone that helps you endure stressful events like a competitive sport, a car crash, or even a rollercoaster ride. Adrenaline makes your heart beat faster, increases your muscle’s ability to contract, and tells your liver to release some of its stored glucose to give you energy. That stored glucose is then released into your bloodstream — but for those of us with diabetes, we don’t produce additional insulin to accompany the extra glucose.
As usual, everyone’s diabetes is a little different. You may find that a cup of coffee on its own doesn’t spike your blood sugar, but two or three cups of coffee definitely do.
Or you may find that drinking coffee in the morning doesn’t spike your blood sugar but drinking coffee in the afternoon does.
Read more: Why Coffee Raises Your Blood Sugars
Everything inside this deli is made out of felt, and it’s all for sale was reported by Evan Nicole Brown for FastCompany.com, 4 October 2019.
Delicatessen on 6th, an interactive public art installation by contemporary British artist Lucy Sparrow, is fashioned completely out of felt. Visitors can buy any of the items, which range from tomatoes and croissants to $80 crabs.
Sparrow is known for using the fuzzy material to hand-make soft versions of real-life items, like cheese, chocolates, and seafood. Her last installation in New York, which took place in 2017, was so popular it sold out of the felted items. The retail experience is at Rockefeller Center at the corner of 49th Street and 6th Avenue, and is part of the Art in Focus public art program presented in partnership with the nonprofit Art Production Fund. Sparrow has also been commissioned to design quirky pieces—beyond the confines of the deli—to place around Rockefeller Center, like an aquarium made of felt, Lycra, and sequins.
Read more: Everything inside this deli is made out of felt, and it’s all for sale
The felt deli looks awesome! So cute, I want to buy one of everything!
The plant based burgers are certainly tasty. But wow do they ever rock the weight watchers points. Weight watchers looks negatively on fat particularly saturated fat and positively on fiber.
These biases make the impossible burger a difficult issue for the weight watchers diet program. Still they are tasty, but I will take the beef and the lower points.